Explore Brazil (and the whole world for that matter) in 3-D right from your computer!

Google Earth is a fantastic free tool developed by those geniuses out on the West Coast that allows the user to virtually explore the entire world! Successfully leveraging user-generated content, you can enhance your personal copy of Google Earth to include incredible levels of detail, in many cases right down to the buildings themselves (at least in major cities).

Though Google Earth doesn’t come with such detail, it is easily attainable through the user forums in the form of KMZ files; check out this amazing Rio de Janeiro content pack which includes almost every neighborhood in Rio, in addition to thousands of businesses and points of interest. Truly breathtaking! You can even zoom in and enjoy topographical views.

On the same page that I got this KMZ for Rio, at the bottom there are links to many many other terrific Brazil-related Google Earth files that I can’t wait to check out. It’s exciting to see how much progress has been made in this massive project to document the whole geography of the Earth, but it is also clear how far there is to go. Google makes available the Sketchup 3-D drawing program so that users can recreate the buildings of the world to scale in the virtual world.

Looks like the Cristo is still missing; someone go and put him in!!